


Family is not blood (Max)

by stillusesapencil



Series: an aching kind of growing [4]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Billy Hargrove Being an Asshole, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dad!Steve, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, found family trope, more like older brother!steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 03:33:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillusesapencil/pseuds/stillusesapencil
Summary: Family is not always who you are born with. Family is not always blood. Family is who you die for. Family is who you live for. And this is what Max lives for: Will’s quiet shy smiles, Dustin’s toothy laughter, Mike’s eye rolls, and El’s look of wonder at a good story. She lives for Steve’s hair ruffles and affectionatedumbass, delivered with a smile.





	Family is not blood (Max)

**Author's Note:**

> I know this took forever, I'm sorry, finals tried to kill me.
> 
> So this one is shorter, because I feel like I'm just rehashing things I've written before. It's still good though. 
> 
> Also, a quick note about child abuse: I tried to accurately portray the mindset of a child who has been abused or been in an abusive home. I hope I did it justice. There shouldn't be any trigger warnings that I can think of, but stay safe everyone.

Max has been running her whole life. She starts at nine months old, taking her first wobbly steps to the hands of her father. She quickly graduates to a run, and doesn’t stop from there. 

Her goal in life is to _go_. Go faster, go farther. It doesn’t matter, she just wants to go. 

She never planned in running away from California, in moving mostly across the country to escape the troubles Billy’s drug use brings upon them, to start a new life where things will be better. 

Max doesn’t think things will be better without her dad. After the divorce, she would have moved in with him, instead of her mom and Neil, but he moved out of her school district, and her parents though it would be better for her to not switch schools. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. 

She was little when they split. Not really old enough to remember what it’s like to have a family, a real family. One that isn’t laced with cracks. 

Her mother braids her hair and says, “Family is not what you’re born with Maxine. Neil and Billy are our family now.”

“Don’t call me Maxine,” she says. But she hears what her mother is trying to say. _Family is not who you are born with. Family is not always blood_. 

It doesn’t matter. She refuses to call them her family. 

In his car outside the Hawkins high school, Billy says, “We’re family now.” 

Max’s stomach twists because _no, this is not how it should be, we are not family_. Family loves you and cares for you and is honest with you. Family doesn’t threaten or frighten or yell. 

Billy tells her it’s her fault they’re here, yanks the admission from Max’s unwilling tongue. But it’s not her fault. She was just drug along for the ride. She had friends in California. She had a life in California.

She had a dad in California.

Family is not who you are born with, but this is not family. Family doesn’t scream at you and family doesn’t threaten your friends and you don’t hate family. Family is who you choose. And Max does not choose this.

In California, her dad was only a phone call away. He’d come on Saturday mornings, early, before anyone else is awake, and takes Max out to catch the big waves. He buys her In-and-Out and drives her home, still smelling like the salty sea. 

In Indiana, there are no open expanses on which to glide and fly. There are no early mornings with the sun painting the turquoise water silver. It is cold, cold enough that Max wears long sleeves all the time. It serves a double purpose: keeping her warm and hiding the bruises Billy leaves on her arms. 

He’s always careful about it. Always when Max’s mom and Neil aren’t home, or in his car. It’s always him grasping until she can feel the blood vessels pop under his finger tips while he hisses at her _piece of shit, ugly, stupid_. It never lasts long, just a few seconds of white-hot fear while Max tries not to cry. 

She wants to go home. She wants to go to the ocean, to California, to throw herself in the sea and perhaps never resurface.

When Lucas starts following her, she is, naturally, freaked out and irritated. He seems to want to be her friend, but yet he and his friends exclude her from their “party.” Either they want to be her friends or they don’t, and she tells Lucas to make up his mind. 

Dustin offers her his discovery (a really slimy frog), smiling at her with happy eyes. Yet Mike makes her leave the room, and it hurts. They either want her or they don’t, and they need to make up their minds. 

In the gym, she floats around Mike, circling him on her skateboard and with her mind, gently prodding him for answers about his dislike of her. It sounds dumb until he says, “And El…El was our Mage.”

There’s something broken there, something that hurts him, and she wants to ask about it, but then a magnet pulls her off the board onto the gym floor. 

Then Lucas lures her into the back room of the arcade, and tells her a crazy story about a magic girl and bad men and a demigorgon (a _demigorgon_ , really?), and she doesn’t believe him. She’s been lied to before (when her mother said Billy would be a good brother, when Neil offered her a slimy smile and said he’d be her “new dad”) and this is no different. She dismisses Lucas with her eyebrows and goes to play her game. _Stupid, but funny._

“We have a lot of rules in our party,” Lucas says, grabbing her wrist. “The most important is friends don’t lie. Never ever. No matter what.”

She wrenches her wrist away, and Lucas doesn’t hold on. She files that away for later (has a boy ever let go of her wrist that easily, without yanking and growling?).

“Is that right?” She’s already been lied to by them, and the little “out of order” sign on the machine is just one example.

Lucas, caught in his own deception, fumbles with excuses about protection. Who does Max need protection from, anyway? The worst monsters live in her own home. Her anger builds, starting in her legs and coming out of her mouth in a rush—bad guys, demigorgon, Eleven—

And then Lucas covers her mouth with his hand (firm, gentle, a little sweaty) and she looks into his eyes (kind, serious, deep brown) and that sells it. He’s telling the truth, or at least he believes the story so much that he can’t lie about it. Maybe he’s been brainwashed. 

“Stop talking,” he says, quiet and solemn. “You’re going to get us killed.”

“You’re serious?”

“I really wish I wasn’t.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t.”

“So what, I’m supposed to just trust you?” Trusting, just like that, will get you hurt. It will end you in an abusive home with a violent step brother.

Billy’s engine revs outside. 

“I gotta go.” 

Lucas looks panicked, desperate. He reaches after her, and she stops him, almost holding his hand. 

“Don’t follow me.” She couldn’t stand to see this compassionate boy crushed under Billy’s hands. 

“Do you believe me?” 

But she doesn’t answer. When Lucas shows up at her door promising proof, she forces herself to thinking about the amazing luck that made her open the door rather than Billy. If he had answered, both Lucas and Max would be in bad shape. 

Lucas pulls up under Max’s window so she can climb onto the back of his bike. 

From there, Max falls head-first into an adventure like those in books, complete with monsters and magic. It’s then she meets Steve Harrington. Steve will very quickly become one of the most important people in her life.

When they are trapped in the house, she prepares to fight the demigorgon with all she has, not just for her sake, but for Lucas and Dustin and Steve, too. 

But it’s a girl. A girl Max has never seen before, not at school, not in pictures. Mike is crying and Lucas and Dustin look so sad. She and Steve share a look of mutual confusion. Max is no dummy, though, and she figures out pretty quickly that this is El.

They split up, and that’s when Max’s luck runs out. Billy shows up looking for her, and she feels like she has brought doom upon them all. 

Steve does his best, he really does, but Billy is going to kill them, Max feels it in her gut. 

She has to do something. She has to do _something_. 

She sees the needle of tranquilizer, left over from subduing Will. She grabs, it, praying it works. 

When she jams it into Billy’s neck, he falls like a stack of bricks, slowly, tipping, sliding, and then collapsing. She threatens his dick with a nailed baseball bat, because God knows that’s what Billy values most in his life, and then she takes his keys, because his car is the other thing he values most in his life. 

There’s no question that she’s driving, and Lucas makes absolutely sure that he’s sitting shotgun. Mike grumbles in the back, and Dustin puts bandaids on Steve like that will help. 

Max thinks about how Steve just met them all yesterday, and threw himself at Billy without a second thought. Granted, he almost died, but he was willing to die for them. She thinks she loves him, a little bit. Not like that, but in the way you love a real brother.

Driving is harder than Max thought, but they make it. Steve screams, and the boys scream, and Max screams, but when they stop short in the field, Max climbs out of the car and says, “Told you. Zoomer.” 

And when it is all over, Max returns home to frantic parents and a sullen and groggy Billy. Her mother strokes her hair and pulls her close, letting out a high-pitched breathy sigh, and Neil stands behind her, severe. There are questions she answers with lies, and there are promises to “always tell them where she’s going” and “don’t run away again,” and Max nods along like a good daughter. And her mother reminds her that this is her family, and she should act like it.

This is not family. Family doesn’t punch your friends half to death and family doesn’t intimidate each other and you don’t want to run away from your family. 

So Max chooses her family—she finds her family in Dustin’s crinkle-eyes smiles, in Will’s big, trusting eyes. She finds family in the way Mike’s mouth purses when he’s annoyed, in the way El looks at everything as though it is the most amazing and perfect thing ever. 

She finds family is Lucas’ gentle hands, in the brush of his fingers against her palm, against the small smile he offers her when no one else is looking. 

As winter comes, she spends more time with Lucas, going to his house. His mother is amazing, a warm woman with open arms. Erica hovers nearby, sassing Lucas and smiling at Max.

In December, Lucas fumbles over asking her to the snowball. She goes home to tell her mother the news. Her mother is estatic, going on about dresses and makeup. Max makes a face. 

She convinces her mother to let her wear pants, thank God, but she acquiesces on braiding her hair with a clip. Billy glares at her over her mother’s shoulder, and she holds his gaze right back. She is her own, and he better remember it.

“So, do you wanna, y’know?” 

Max stares at Lucas. “Are you trying to ask me to dance?”

“Uh, yeah.” Lucas smiles.

She wraps her hands around the back of his neck, swaying back and forth. And in the magic blue light of the dance, she leans in and does what she’s wanted to do for a long time. She kisses him, short and sweet, pulling back to shrug and grin. Lucas grins back, and it just feels _right_.

Mike finally lets her in the party, now that El is returned to him. For a while it is tense between them. He doesn’t apologize, but once, after a D&D session, he tells her she’s a good zoomer.

She tilts her mouth up, looking at him and El, and says, “You too, Mike.” And that’s it. That’s all it will be.

El, too understands after a point. Once Mike explains and once El sees Lucas and Max together, El understands. Max was never intended to be her replacement. They find solace in each other—two girls (who aren’t really sure how to be _girls_ ) in a world of boys. El asks her to help her paint nails like she saw on TV, and Max shows her how to ride a skateboard. El wobbles, eyes big as she holds her hands out, grasping at air. 

Max likes El, likes them all. She joins D&D that winter. Lucas sits her down in his bedroom with sheets of paper and a handful of dice.

“Okay, so first we have to pick your character class.” 

“I want to be a zoomer.”

Lucas shakes his head. “That’s not a thing. Do you just want to go fast?”

“Yeah, that sounds good. Okay, let’s go with a rogue.” 

Together they roll dice to get her points, and then he asks her to create a back story. She sits with the pad of paper for a long time, writing, as Lucas steals glances at her over his book. When she is finished, it’s the story of a girl who killed her brother to protect her father. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, perhaps it’s projection, whatever the case it’s a good story. Lucas reads it slowly, nodding and humming occasionally.

“Good story,” he says finally, quiet and tender. 

“Thanks,” she says, and scoots closer to lean against him.

During basketball season, she insists on going to Steve’s basketball games. She and Dustin pool their quarters together to get popcorn and hotdogs, and sit in the bleachers to cheer for him. 

After a game, he’ll come from the locker rooms, still smelling faintly sweaty, and take them for ice cream. He ruffles Max’s hair and then squats so she can ride on his back.

Grinning, eyes bright, she feels like she’s on top of the world. It’s horribly unfair that she got Billy as her brother, and not Steve. But family is not always blood. Family is who you chose. And Max chooses Steve as her brother. 

Steve drops off her everyone at their homes before Max and Lucas, and she pesters him from the passenger seat. “Can I drive? Can I? Please? I’m a good driver, you know I’m a good driver, please let me drive!”

“Alright, alright, you can drive.” Steve looks at her sideways, and pulls over. “Just don’t crash it, okay, I can’t afford it.”

“ _Yes!_ ” Max fist pumps and climbs over into the driver’s seat. Steve slides into the passenger side. 

“Go easy,” says Steve. “It’s a neighborhood, so you have to watch for people.” 

“Right,” Max says, and the car lurches forward.

“Woah, woah, woah! Ease up! Ease up!” 

Max giggles. “I got this, relax.”

And she gets them safely to Lucas’s house. She climbs out and Lucas hugs her goodbye. 

Steve rolls his eyes. “Don’t let your cooties get on my car,” he grouses.

She smiles. “Shut up, Steve, we all know your cooties are already all over the car.” 

Steve rolls his eyes. He drops her off at her house. “If you need anything, you can always call,” he says. “Anytime.” He looks at her, big eyes hard and serious.

“Right. I’ll just tell Billy to not break a plate over your head this time.”

“Max. I mean it.”

She looks from the console to Steve’s face. He means it. “Okay,” she says quietly, before leaning over quickly to hug him goodbye. She squeezes fast and tight and clambers out of the car before he can say anything. 

In February, Neil has an episode. It’s not that unusual for him to rage, maybe throw a few things, yelling about how he’s the only one who does anything around here, how Billy is a piece of shit (at least he has that right), how his job is shitty, how they’re all ungrateful for the sacrifices he makes. He’s never touched Max during one of those episodes, but it scares her. It’s bad, this time.

Max calls Lucas, thinking of a way to ask for help without attracting attention. She settles on homework, praying he’ll catch the code, catch her plea for help.

Lucas is a smart boy. He gets it. And he comes on his bike to take her away. 

At Lucas’s house, it is quiet. It is safe. She almost cries as she tells him, ashamed for her fear. Lucas doesn’t pity her, it seems, but he listens as she shakily explains about Neil and his yelling. 

It strikes her on Lucas’s porch that she wants to kill Billy and Neil. She wants to rescue her mother and take them all back to California, where she belongs. But then she’s have to leave Lucas, and Dustin and El and Mike and Will. And she can’t do that. Not anymore.

You don’t leave your family.

Lucas must have told Steve, or maybe Steve just figures it out, but he starts picking her up after school, occasionally holding his bat. Part of her hopes he’ll use it someday. Part of her hopes _she’ll_ use it someday.

The day Steve graduates, Dustin’s mother sits them all together to cheer for Steve as he crosses the stage. She hugs him in his itchy black robe as Dustin bats at his tassel. Max sticks by his side as Mrs. Henderson herds them into order to take pictures. 

At the after-party at Steve’s house, Lucas takes her hand and pulls gently, asking questions with his eyes. He bikes them across town, out of town, to the quarry, where they sit and watch the sun slip under the horizon. 

Lucas kisses her, drawing it out, and she lets out a small noise. He smiles against her lips and laughs into her mouth. It’s questions and answers, unspoken promises and quiet reassurances. 

A few weeks later, Lucas takes her on her first real date. She even lets her mother put a braid in her hair. 

He pays for her meal with cash she knows he’s been saving. It makes her feel special, and a little awkward. No one’s done that for her before, except her dad.

They sit on either side of the table, without anyone else, and Max feels a little glow start in her belly. She promises herself she’s not going to mess this up. 

“Throw fries into my mouth,” she blurts, and okay, maybe that’s not the way to _not mess this up_ but Lucas just smiles and picks up a fry and takes aim. It’s why she likes him. He gets her.

He tosses the fry, and she tilts to catch it, but it bounces off her nose. The next few miss as well, and then he gets one, and she bites down to pull it into her mouth. 

“Hey dipshits!” shouts Steve from the kitchen. “I’m not your mother! I’m not cleaning up that mess!”

Lucas grin and shrugs at her, and she grins right back. She thinks she might love him a little bit. 

In the summer, Will invites her over to his house. She’s the first one there, and Will bashfully takes her to the backyard to Castle Byers. It’s the first time they’ve hung out, just them. Will has always struck her as a quiet, soft boy, fighting PTSD with quiet determination. 

In Castle Byers, Will is more fidgety than she’s seen him before, and after a few halted awkward statements, he finally says, “I need to tell you something.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I think I like boys. The way other boys like girls.”

_Oh. So that’s what this is about._ “I know.” 

“You know?”

She smiles, rolls her eyes. “I have eyes.” She’s seen the way the poor boy looks at Mike.

He panics a bit, but she calms him down, promising him she will always support him and help him find a good boyfriend. 

The thing is, Will spend a lot of time being treated like a pane of glass, but Max sees the truth. Glass would have broken by now. Will is more like metal, bending without breaking, ultimately sturdy and strong.

Dustin takes her to the library, ducks to avoid the librarian, and shows her all the books. “This is my favorite place,” he says. “Well, one of my favorites. I also like Hammond’s. And the arcade. And—”

“I get it,” she says, and softens her words with a smile. 

Dustin grins back. “I know you like to read.”

She punches his shoulder and goes off to look for books. By the time Steve comes to pick them up, she has a stack of books as tall as her torso. It’s summer. She has time. The librarian makes her put half of them back anyway.

And what a summer it is. Max thought she would miss the summer in California—spending every day at the beach, surfing from early morning until lunch, the smell of the ocean mixed with sunscreen, going to bed all sleepy from the sun and sand. And she does, a little, but Indiana summers have a certain charm. For one, it’s not as hot, and Steve has a pool. 

One evening, as the boys attempt to drown each other, she sees El reading at the edge of the shallow end, only her feet in the water.

“What are you reading?” she asks, paddling up to El.

“Nancy Drew.”

“I like her. Is it good?”

El nods, smiling. 

Max hoists herself up next to El. “You’re pretty cool, you know? You can—” Max waves her hand vaguely in the air—“Throw stuff with your mind and shit. It’s cool.”

El smiles, cocking her head. “You’ve told me I’m cool before.”

Max shrugs, looking away at the splashing boys. “I know. But people can always stand to hear how cool they are.”

El nods. 

“Hey, I have some books at my house. Would you like to borrow them sometime?”

El’s face splits into a grin and she nods enthusiastically. 

“Okay. I’ll bring ‘em the next time we hang out, kay?”

“Okay.” El returns to her book, and Max swims away to climb on Lucas’s shoulders so they can absolutely smoke Mike and Will in a chicken fight. 

The only thing that would make her summer more perfect is a chance to remind Billy who she is, who he is, and that he should absolutely leave her alone. The chance never comes. Maybe it will in the future, maybe it won’t. For now, she simply endures. 

In late summer, Neil has another episode bad enough that she calls Lucas. He comes and rescues her again, and they sit on his roof. 

On the roof, she promises she will take him to California to meet her dad and teach him to surf. She plans their roadtrip, already thinking of how much money she has saved and how they would get there. They can go after they graduate, take a roadtrip before college. 

Then she says, “You—you and Mike and everyone, you feel like home, y’know?” It’s what she’s wanted to say for a long time. This is her home. They are her family. 

Family is not always who you are born with. Family is not always blood. Family is who you die for. Family is who you live for. And this is what Max lives for: Will’s quiet shy smiles, Dustin’s toothy laughter, Mike’s eye rolls, and El’s look of wonder at a good story. She lives for Steve’s hair ruffles and affectionate _dumbass_ , delivered with a smile. 

She lives for Lucas’s gentle hands, kind eyes, truthful soul. She lives for the day when they can get away together, when the only person they have to worry about is one another, when Neil and Billy are only distant memories. It will be true one day.

And so this is her family. It might be a bit broken sometimes, but it’s still good. That’s enough for now. For the first time in her life, Max stops running, take a breath, and finds her home.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus points if you spot my Lilo and Stitch reference.
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.stillusesapencil.tumblr.com)


End file.
